Several in Stalin’s entourage witnessed on the trips around the country the appalling consequences of this policy. (They did this without calling for a reversal of the general line: they were not Bukharinists.) Stalin was unbudgeable from the general line of agrarian policy. The most he would concede was that local implementation had been excessive and that officials in the provinces had misunderstood central policy. On 2 March 1930 Pravda printed an article by him, ‘Dizzy with Success’, which castigated over-zealous collectivisers:24
It follows that the task of the party is to consolidate the achieved successes and to use them in a planned fashion for further movement forward.
But the successes have their dark side, especially when they are achieved ‘easily’ and, so to speak, through the mode of ‘unexpectedness’.
He deceitfully insisted that it had always been his intention that collectivisation should be conducted on the voluntary principle. By then the proportion of the USSR’s agricultural households herded into collective farms had risen to about 55 per cent.25 Stalin maintained that local party officials were guilty of ‘excesses’ and ‘distortions’. Unlike the United Opposition, he declared the central party leadership had not intended to impose collectivisation by force and by decrees.
‘Dizzy with Success’ involved gargantuan hypocrisy. Although he was primarily culpable for the recent acceleration, Stalin did not admit blame. For a whole year he had goaded party officials to bully peasants into collective farms. He had issued fearsome directives on dekulakisation. He had sacked and disgraced politicians who criticised the pace of collectivisation; even his cronies in the Politburo had attracted his ire. But he had a highly developed instinct for political self-preservation. Embitterment against him was intense in society. The time had come to place the blame on those who had faithfully implemented his wishes. He got away with this. Confused lower-level officials allowed many millions of households to revert to traditional land tenure. Quickly the percentage of collective farms in the USSR’s agriculture started falling: by early June it was only twenty-three.26 Yet Stalin, while willing to retreat tactically, was fixed on his strategy: Soviet farming was to be forced into the collectivist mould in short order. After the summer the campaign for total collectivisation was resumed and in 1932 about 62 per cent of the households engaged in agriculture belonged to collective farms. The percentage was to rise to ninety in 1936.27 This was achieved by means of massively increased force applied with greater precision than before. The result was turmoil in the countryside. The combination of violent seizure of grain stocks and violent reorganisation of farm tenure and employment resulted in famine across vast areas.
The economic premise of policy was not publicly revealed, but Stalin made it plain in an instruction to Molotov: ‘Force up the export of grain to the maximum. This is the core of everything. If we export grain, credits will be forthcoming.’28 A few days later, in August 1930, he repeated the message in case its content had not been fully accepted. Mikoyan had reported complacently about the level of wheat procurement across the USSR. This to Stalin was insufferable. The point was to go on raising that level and to ‘force up’ the grain export trade ‘wildly’.29 Nothing less than a hysterical campaign to collect and sell wheat abroad would satisfy him.
Again and again he reverted to tactical, temporary retreats such as had happened with ‘Dizzy with Success’. On holiday by the Black Sea in August 1931 he saw enough for himself to know that collectivisation had reduced ‘a series of districts in west Georgia to starvation’. But characteristically he blamed the resident party and OGPU officials: ‘They don’t understand that the Ukrainian methods of grain procurement, necessary and sensible in grain districts, are imprudent and harmful in non-grain districts which, moreover, have no industrial proletariat.’ He even deplored the arrest of hundreds of people — not a reaction normally found in Stalin’s career.30 Stalin recommended that grain be shipped forthwith into west Georgia. Contrary to what is often thought, the Politburo under his leadership frequently made such decisions on emergency relief. But always the main strategic objective was kept in mind and eventually reapplied. Industrialisation and collectivisation were two sides of the same coin. The state needed to seize grain for export in order to finance the expansion of mining and manufacturing output. Stalin left no one in the Kremlin in doubt about this.
He barked out the case for driving the economic transformation at a frenetic pace in a speech to a conference of industrial officials and managers on 4 February 1931:31
To slacken the tempos would be to fall behind. And the backward get beaten. We don’t want to be beaten. No, that’s not what we want. The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish– lords. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: ‘You are wretched, you are abundant, you are mighty, you are powerless, Mother Russia.’
The language had an emotional intensity he had not used since Lenin’s funeral. The sonorous phrases hit home like a hammer. The patriotic appeal was unmistakable. The simple metaphor of ‘beating’, repeated again and again, conveyed the urgency of the struggle ahead.
Stalin warned his audience: ‘Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward and the weak. The wolf’s law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak — so you are in the wrong and therefore you can be beaten and enslaved.’32 The solution, he insisted, was irresistible:33
We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.
This is what our obligations before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us.
He had no doubt about what could be achieved. At a May Day reception in 1933 he was to declare:34
If the Russians are armed with tanks, aircraft and a marine fleet, they’re invincible, invincible.
But they cannot advance badly armed in the absence of technology, and the whole history of old Russia is summed up in this.
The Leader’s voice in his 1931 speech to the industrial officials and managers had confirmed that there would be no vacillation. The course of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation had been set and there would be no deviation from it. Leader, party and state were wholly determined to reach the plotted destination. Firmness and courage were required. But Stalin was confident. In a sentence that was quickly picked up by official propagandists he declared: ‘There are no fortresses that could not be stormed by Bolsheviks.’ Looking across the audience, he moved to the finale of his speech:35